Handsprings for Kids? 27
matt conway asks: "I'm working in an alternative school for 'at-risk' kids: Inner-city, economically disadvantaged, K-8, in a midwestern rust-belt city. Seems Handspring has a program to provide their hardware for these kids. I'm looking for suggestions on how to use their products to give these kids a leg up in life. Obvious uses are collaborative class projects beamed back and forth, GPS to map out neighborhoods and incidental environmental data, digital photography and writing to produce a school paper. I'm not a CS major, so I wondered if ./ readers had more suggestions for turning hardware into better brains." If Handsprings aren't ideal for this sort of thing, what handhelds might be a decent replacement?
Re:beware goatse.cx image (Score:1, Troll)
What do the kids need? (Score:3, Informative)
Although instead of asking "What can we do with Handsprings?" it may be better to ask "What do these kids need?" Once we have this long list we can then look at which elements a PDA can help with.
Unfortunately I am not of much help to you on this point, but I imagine some things they may need are:
- Local Map
- important phone numbers
- Bus/train timetables?
- Class information (Timetable, diary etc.)
Also, it may be an idea to capitalise on the initial novelty value. The kids will be playing with these things quite a bit, so why not include some educational games [hungryfrog.com]?
And accessories... (Score:1, Funny)
Hmmm... I think some accessories [smith-wesson.com] would be wise, no?
Free Software from HICE (Score:3, Informative)
programming (Score:3, Interesting)
what ever you do... (Score:4, Funny)
dopewars [pdaguy.com]
its addictive
Tech isn't necessarily the answer (Score:4, Insightful)
www.abebooks.com
"Tunnel in the Sky": teaches about self reliance and teamwork. 110 copies, $2-$5 a piece
"Starship Troopers": Honor, courage, and a case history in how Holleywood can really screw up a good story. 159 copies, $2-$6 a piece.
"Rocket Ship Galileo": Teach history by looking at what we thought the future would be like over 50 years ago, i.e WHY don't we have nuclear powered rockets piloted by teenage kids. 39 copies, $3-$10 (make them share)
Buy a few copies per kid - make them swap.
Just have to have tech? Find e-book versions of them.
And the list goes on.
Check USight for Curriculum Ideas (Score:3, Informative)
USight is a website dedicated to promoting ubiquitous computing in education. There is a curriculum page offerring curriculum ideas at:
http://usight.concord.org/curriculum/ [concord.org]
You can also find more information about handhelds in education on the Concord Consortium site at:
http://www.concord.org/themes/handhelds.html [concord.org]
Well, there's the obvious (Score:1)
drug wars (Score:2)
Uh, Cliff? (Score:2, Funny)
Now, for the question: I think the most important use of the Handsprings will be their intended purpose. These aren't all-purpose computers, there really is a limit to how much you can do. They are excellent for setting up appointments, keeping track of tasks, jotting down small notes, and useful little utilities like the calculator. I've only found a few useful apps other than the ones included. Most of those are games, which probably will have the effect of kids not paying attention in class; but drawing and mapping programs can be pretty useful.
I think there isn't much you can do with a Handspring that will directly correlate to increased intelligence, but you can get them used to keeping their lives organized and laying out plans for the future. That alone could help immensely for kids who'll have to fight to get anywhere in life.
Tech Too Early (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tech Too Early (Score:4, Insightful)
There seems to be a misconception in the US that money and technology will solve all problems. While they can certainly help, they are not the solution, but rather the tools used to affect it. The thing we forget is that tools are often interchangable, and the most technologically advanced is not always the best for the job.
A pencil and a peice of paper are the best tools around for teaching concepts of math, for example. A calculator is more high-tech, and possibly more impressive to the casual observer, but the student will learn far less using one, and it's a lot more expensive.
I have to give the article credit, though, in that this is the first time I've seen any suggestions for using tech in primary education that I consider legitimate, helpful, or even non-counterproductive to the ultimate goal of education. Maybe a class project to map the migrations of transients using local maps and GPS. Political Correctness issues aside, I would have been way into something like that as a kid. Maybe marking locations and descriptions of plants around the school would be more appropriate...
Anyway, technology can be good for education, but all too often it does more harm than good as our boundless enthusiasm leads to its misuse. All things considered, the money would be much better spent on higher quality books, both fiction and nonfiction, or even just making sure the kids all have basic school supplies like pencils and paper and maybe a binder to keep it all organized.
Time, not Tech. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to give inner city kids a chance give them Time, not Tech.
Pick five of these kids and spend an hour apiece with each one of them per week. Or maybe a five hour visit with the group per week. Take em to a park bench and just shoot straight with them. Tell them honestly about the benefits of education, the value of keeping their word and doing good, the extreme penalty associated with becoming an unwed teenage mother (or father.) Tell them about how a 3 year enlistment in the military will fund their GI Bill give them the self respect, focus, drive, and other skills necessary to succeed. Show them why life isn't about the quick score, but about living a life worth remembering. Tell them about the mistakes you made in life - so maybe they can learn from your mistakes. Explain that their parents are not always right, but they are doing the best they know how to do. Be someone they look up to, respect, and admire - if even one kid stays out of trouble just one time for no other reason than he didn't want to let you down
Bring a camera. Take a lot of pictures of them - even though they will be apprehensive at first. Teach them to always be proud of who they are and what they are doing, live life as if someone was filming them
When they reach adulthood in 10 years it won't matter if they could use a Palm Pilot in grammar school or not (qv C=64) but having pride in who they are and respect for others, respect for themselves, and an eagerness to live a good life will make all the difference in the world.
Glonoinha
its not a bad idea (Score:2, Informative)
In Other News... (Score:2, Insightful)
Time Management? (Score:3, Interesting)
Programming for the handheld. Teach them to make games, software, whatever gets them into it.
Well, my $0.02, and that's probably over priced.
Re:Time Management? (Score:1)
That is what I have done with my Cybiko [cybikoxtreme.com]. I basically use it to keep track of school projects and homework--it has an application to keep track of homework, and for projects I just keep notes on what's due when and who I'm working with in a text file.
I don't really think they're useless, because having your notes or assignments neatly listed and organized prevents slip-ups that can happen if a paper gets lost. Also, Cybiko, just like Handspring's devices, has an offline email-synchronizer. When I had group projects in math, I would take notes in the meetings and jot down things, and email them to the entire group when I got home. Also, it saved time because we could all get each other's names, phone numbers, and AIM sn's in one email instead of jotting them down.
This is pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on, as if a PDA is what a school-child (in any socio-economic condition) needs. What ever happend to reading books? and doing math by hand? I was in a stationery store the other day and noticed that the math sets (compass, dividers, rulers, triangles, etc) now include a calculator. Sheesh! As if people weren't already bad enough at math!
I'm all for having a computer in the classroom. Heck, I think learning to program a computer is a useful activity because it encourages problem solving and creativity. However, teaching students to use a Handspring seems a little pointless. Students need to learn concepts, not tools. They need to learn English and grammar, not how to run the spell-checker.
There is one exception to my anti-Handspring stance. If the school had some learning activity that could only realistically be done on a set of Handsprings, and that wasn't technology related, then I'd agree that having a class set, that must be signed-in/out for each class, might be a good idea. Just like how my school had microscopes, not so that we could learn optics, but so that we could learn about cells, it would be acceptable for the school to use computing devices (of any nature) to achieve some other goal. However, if it's just data collection, I'd say it's not really worth it.
There needs to be a focus on learning the principles. For example, when teaching a student about navigation and maps and orienteering, don't give them a GPS. Give them a compass and teach them how to pace out a path. When teaching students about graphing weather trends, make them graph it on paper. They won't have so much data that they need a computer to do it. If they WANT to use a computer, maybe it's ok if they learn it on their own, but don't make it the objective.
Computers are a tool; a means, not an end.
Re:This is pointless - mod this guy UP (Score:1)
What can these do for kids? (Score:2)
First and formost, if you want your kids to get a leg up in life, teach them to program little games. You are teaching them to think systematically through layers of abstraction, and teaching them to bring a creative vision to life in such a way that their labors can be enjoyed by other students... Your math and art department will thank you.
2nd, give them a scavenger hunt with maps of your city (and phone numbers in case a group / group leader gets lost). You wouldn't believe how many high - school kids haven't ventured out further than a block or two away from home.
Have them jot notes at a city-council meeting, and ask the council members afterwards about their experience. Have them go to a meeting of the district school board and interview them. OK, this isn't directly related to the handspring, but removing the mistique from the way a city is run is important for developing citizens.
Of course, get a good graphing calculator application for the math courses... Just not too good of one. You want a calculator that will let kids visualize the look of a graph, but not one that will let them plug in equasions and have the calc solve calculus for them.
English / english, english / spanish dictionaries. This will really depend upon the kind of RAM you will have available, but dictionaries will really help out the ESL kids. And you should consider having an all-spanish day of some sort, to make the english kids' brains work in a way they may not be accustomed to.
There is also Avant-Go, which is a free service that may not be terribly educational but will let your kids download and read specific sites like news.bbc.co.uk from their palms. Reading is never a bad thing. Speaking of which, a quick search will net you thousands of free classic books... It might save your english department a little bit of money to download and beam a copy of Romeo and Juliette or The Scarlett Letter, rather than buying paperback versions... though with the added advantage of letting kids highlight the heck out of their books a cheap dover thrift edition [doverpublications.com] might be educationally sound.
And if you have already read down this far, palm boulevard [palmboulevard.com] is reporting that eSchool News [eschoolnews.com] just voted the palm the best OS for teaching. While I can't get through to the site to confirm details, I bet you could find some great ideas there.
Whatever you choose, remember to get very hard, very durable covers for these things. My girlfriend and I have a wall devoted to our broken palm pilots... with five up there and climbing, and we're not going to be any near as hard on these things as your kids will be. Good luck! I hope this helps. -chris
Many useful softwares (Score:1)
1. Electronic dicitionary. mine is called "Noah Lite", there's medium and pro versions.
2. digital metronomes, musical term dicitionaries, and digital tuning forks for music classes if you have any.
3. The built-in Handspring scienticfic calculator works like a charm. It can change modes of measurements like length, width, volume, area, weight, temperatures, etc.
4. Scientic Tables like the "Periodic table" can be transfered to the Visor and be viewed anytime for Science classes.
5. E-books are good when there's free time and the kids aren't allowed to go out and play. Anything from Sci-fi to Romance. =) Also there are plenty of drawing or paint programs out there that let's you draw right on the screen.
6. There are chess games that let you connect to other players via infra-red. It would be fun to see the kids challenge each other thorugh chess.
7. If you really want the kids to get geeky, there's a springboard module out there from Margi that let's you view color presentations through your visor when you connect it to a digital projector. Well first you have to make the actual presentation on the computer then you hotsync to your visor using the including conduit software when you purchase the "Margi-Presenter-to-go"
here's their website: http://www.margi.com/
8. Last but not the least, there are plenty of handspring modules out there for references. Including dicitionaries, translators, medical references, graphing calculators, etc.
All the above *software* that I've mentioned are free. You can download those at these sites:
www.freewarepalm.com
www.palmgear.com
www.pda
www.memoware.com (e-books)
www.palmpilotarchives.com
www.eurocoo
That's all I can offer. Hmm..it would be interesting to see if the kids would cheat on tests by sharing answers via infra-red? =)
KeelSpawn